As many of you know I will be heading off to college in the next month... I recently acquired a Gateway MX3225 Laptop for only $400 which gets 3 hours of battery life... which is perfect for me for taking notes and such... but since im going to school for networking, I need more of a powerhouse in my dorm. So I got to thinking "what saves space, is really powerful, and isnt redicuiliously expensive.... MiniPC."
So here is my current setup:
Athlon XP 2500+ Barton Core 1.87ghz
512Mb PC2700
120 gig primary hard drive
60 gig secondardy hard drive
Radeon 9600 256mb
Plextor PX-712A DVD burner
So a pretty basic setup... Its lacking in the Memory and video card department, and the processor is a stones throw away from being obsolete. I just decided it wquld be good to have something smaller an more powerful.
I plan to reuse my DVD rom and hard drives. So thats a big money saver. But I need a video card/memory/ barebones (mobo and case)and a processor... here is what I came up with.
-ASUS Pundit P1-AH1 AMD Socket 939 $169.99
-XFX PVT42EUDE3 Geforce 6800 XTreme 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 $134.77
-Patriot 1GB (2 x 512MB) $90.99
-AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 2000MHz $109.00
Shipping $26.73
Total - $531.48
price is a little higher then I wanted to go. I didnt want to go much over $450. But seems like a perfect setup... What I want to know is if anybody has any comments about any of the parts choices... Particullarly the video card, because ive been a little out of date on video cards. anything I get get a better bang for my buck for? I refuse to purchase another ATI product. I used to have a 9600 XT. but it burned out after 2 months of use, this 9600 I have now I had laying around, and its worse then my old TI4200.